From his home in exile outside Paris, the defiant leader of the Iranian revolution effectively offered the Carter administration a deal: Iranian military leaders listen to you, he said, but the Iranian people follow my orders.

If President Jimmy Carter could use his influence on the military to clear the way for his takeover, Khomeini suggested, he would calm the nation. Stability could be restored, America's interests and citizens in Iran would be protected.

At the time, the Iranian scene was chaotic. Protesters clashed with troops, shops were closed, public services suspended. Meanwhile, labour strikes had all but halted the flow of oil, jeopardising a vital Western interest.

Persuaded by Carter, Iran's autocratic ruler, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, known as the Shah, had finally departed on a "vacation" abroad, leaving behind an unpopular prime minister and a military in disarray - a force of 400,000 men with heavy dependence on American arms and advice.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36431160

You get what you pay for, right? When it comes to online charter schools, apparently not.

Despite receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from California’s taxpayers, California Virtual Academies (CAVA), the state’s largest provider of online public education, is failing key tests used to measure educational success. According to an investigation by The San Jose Mercury News, fewer than half of the thousands of students who enroll in CAVA schools graduate, and almost none of them are qualified to attend the state’s public universities. All the while, the publicly traded corporation that owns the network, K12 Inc., continues to rake in massive profits.

Online charter schools — also known as “cyber” or “virtual” schools — are funded like charter schools with physical buildings and face-to-face interaction. When a student enrolls in an online school, the school receives most of the taxpayer funding that would have gone to the student’s local public school.

Without strong oversight, this can be a windfall for companies like K12 Inc. The Mercury News investigation reveals that CAVA teachers have been asked to inflate attendance and enrollment records used to determine public funding—students who spend as little as one minute during a school day logged into company software can be counted as present. And while records show that the company’s employees started each of K12 Inc.’s 17 online schools in California, the applications they filed to open the schools described the founders as a “group of parents,” none of whom were named.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/donald-cohen/cashing-in-on-charter-sch_b_9853042.html

DEMOCRATIC LAWMAKERS HAVE declared that they will work to get money out of politics, but only a few are interested in getting rid of a Democratic Party system that allows corporate lobbyists to select the party’s presidential nominee, potentially thwarting the will of voters.

Democratic National Committee rules allow for 712 so-called superdelegates to vote at the nominating convention, alongside the 4,053 pledged delegates who are selected directly by primary voters and caucusgoers.

Most of the 712 superdelegates, who are not bound to the decisions of voters, are elected Democratic politicians. But a significant number are individuals in the private sector. As we reported previously, several superdelegates are former politicians and party insiders who now work as lobbyists for banks, oil companies, foreign governments, and payday lenders, among other special interests.

https://theintercept.com/2016/04/06/superdelegates-lobbyists/